Forty Autumns is an illuminating and deeply moving memoir that goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales. This true story, told by a former American military intelligence officer, reveals the experiences of her family—five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, culminating in their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom—leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home—was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own.

Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner, became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team—a bitter political war kept them apart.

In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story—five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.

This is a personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us. Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love—of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family.

In October 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to be sliding inexorably toward a nuclear conflict over the placement of missiles in Cuba. Veteran Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs has pored over previously untapped American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to produce the most authoritative book yet on the Cuban missile crisis.

In his hour-by-hour chronicle of those near-fatal days, Dobbs reveals some startling new incidents that illustrate how close we really did come to Armageddon. Here, for the first time, are gripping accounts of Khrushchev's plan to destroy the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo; the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American spy plane; the movement of Soviet nuclear warheads around Cuba during the tensest days of the crisis; the activities of CIA agents inside Cuba; and the crash landing of an American F-106 jet with a live nuclear weapon on board.

Dobbs takes us inside the White House and the Kremlin as Kennedy and Khrushchev—rational, intelligent men separated by an ocean of ideological suspicion—agonize over the possibility of war. He shows how these two leaders recognized the terrifying realities of the nuclear age while Castro—never swayed by conventional political considerations—demonstrated the messianic ambition of a man selected by history for a unique mission.

As the story unfolds, Dobbs brings us onto the decks of American ships patrolling Cuba; inside sweltering Soviet submarines and missile units as they ready their warheads; and onto the streets of Miami, where anti-Castro exiles plot the dictator's overthrow. Based on exhaustive new research and told in breathtaking prose, here is a riveting account of history's most dangerous hours, full of lessons for our time.

The Public Burning is a groundbreaking novel that emerged as a controversial best-seller in 1977. It has since become one of the most influential novels of our time. This work of contemporary fiction is unique as it uses living historical figures as characters.

The novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The story is dominantly narrated by Vice-President Richard Nixon — the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime.

The novel features an enormous cast including Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate.

All these characters, along with thousands more, converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. Not a single person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless public spectacle.

Three complete, previously-issued novels, each a thrilling tale of espionage from the bestselling author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Considered the father of the spy thriller, bestselling author John le Carré brings the daring deeds and intricate details of international espionage to center stage. His leading man is George Smiley, sometime acting chief of the Circus (as le Carré's secret service is known): a troubled man of infinite compassion, yet a single-mindedly ruthless adversary.

Through these three enormously successful novels (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People), Smiley stalks his opposite number, code-named Karla, the Soviet case officer who has been masterminding the Circus' ruin. The stage is a Cold War landscape of moles and lamplighters, scalp-hunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned, or bought.

In a rolling sea off the coast of South America, a target disappears in a puff of green light. In the Soviet hills of Dushanbe near the Afghanistan border, an otherworldly array of pillars and domes rises into the night. To the two greatest nations on earth, no contest is more urgent than the race to build the first Star Wars missile defense system.

No one knows this more than the two men charged with assessing the Soviets' capabilities: Colonel Mikhail Filitov of the Soviet Union, an old-line warrior distrusted by the army's new inner circle of technocrats, and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, hero of the Red October affair.

Each must use all his craft to arrive at the truth, but Filitov gets there first — and that's when all hell breaks loose. Because Filitov, code-named Cardinal, is America's highest agent in the Kremlin, and he is about to be betrayed to the KGB. His rescue could spell the difference between peace and war, and it is up to Jack Ryan to accomplish it — if he can.

In a breathtaking sequence of hunter and hunted, Filitov's life, and Ryan's, and that of the world itself, literally hang in the balance.